Word: morphing
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...North Carolina congressional race, the Republican candidate is airing videotape of his Democratic rival jogging with the unpopular President, as a voice-over intones, "Look who Martin Lancaster is running around with in Washington!" Other TV ads for Republicans across the country are using special effects to morph their Democratic opponents' faces into the visage of President Clinton -- who must wonder why, if he has all these clones on Capitol Hill, he can't pass his legislation...
...about creating the 49 combinations of progeny from the seven men and seven women featured in the TIME picture chart shown below? Doing so by the scientific rules of genetic engineering -- themselves extremely complex and not yet fully understood -- would be impossible. Instead, TIME chose a software package called Morph 2.0, produced by Gryphon, to run on a Macintosh Quadra 900. The Morph 2.0 is an offspring of Hollywood's sophisticated special-effects equipment used to produce such eye poppers as Michael Jackson's celebrated metamorphosis in his Black or White video and the evil robot that wreaks havoc...
...Morph 2.0 enabled TIME to pinpoint key facial features on the photos of the 14 people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds chosen for the chart. Electronic dots defined head size, skin color, hair color and texture, eyebrows, the contours of the lips, nose and eyes, even laugh lines around the mouth. The eyes in particular required many key points to make them as detailed as possible; otherwise the results would be very erratic. Similarly, miscalculating the dimensions of an upper lip only slightly, for example, could badly skew the resulting face...
...physical characteristics of their progenitors, though an entirely different image can be created by using, say, 75% of the man's eyes, or 75% of the woman's lips. After the eyes, the most important parental feature is the neck, which often determines the gender of the morph offspring...
...last week's ^ Oscars. The nominees were Hook, for its twinkly, shrinkly Tinkerbell (created by a team at producer George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic shop), Backdraft, for its nifty fire rampage (Industrial Light & Magic) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in part for its liquid-metal cyborg that can "morph" -- change seamlessly, seductively -- into any shape (Industrial Light & Magic). And the Oscar went to . . . Industrial Light & Magic...